top of page

Bibliography

As an interdisciplinary topic, scholarship on food and rhetoric often spans across different journals, conferences, and fields making it difficult to locate. This bibliography is a working-reading list for those interested in digging into food rhetorics. The goal of this reading list is to be inclusive to any writing useful for scholars, teachers, and students. This list will be particularly useful for graduate students creating exam lists focused on food studies.

 

Publications were collected from major disciplinary journals in rhetoric and composition using the keyterms: food, recipe, cook, eat, and foodways. Publications from interdisciplinary food studies journals were found by searching keyterms: rhetoric, composition, writing, cookbook, foodways, recipe, and texts. If there is a reading you recommend (including your own work!) you can add the reading via this googlesheet. 

This list is a work in progress. All titles link to the publication or an open-access copy of the text. If you lack institutional access, feel free to email a request for a copy of the publication.

Title
Author
Date
Publisher
“You Have Time, and You Should Cook, Tonight:” Erasing Feminized Labor on 30-Minute Meals
Ashley M. Beardsley
2024
Peitho
“Cooking in Someone Else’s Kitchen”: Exploring Food as a Commonplace for Antiracist Pedagogy, White Allyship, and Feeding Civic Imagination
E. Vivian Leigh
2024
Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association
Bait al-Mouneh: Traditional Syrian Homemaking as Roots for Women’s Agency
Nabila Hijazi
2024
constellations
Thinking Across Modes and Media (and Baking Cake): Two Techniques for Writing with Video, Audio, and Images
Crystal VanKooten
2023
Writing Spaces
Constructing the gendered body in prison cookbooks
A. E. Stearns and Casey D. Albritton
2023
Food, Society, and Culture
Food Justice Activism and Pedagogies: Literacies and Rhetorics for Transforming Food Systems in Local and Transnational Contexts
Eileen E. Schell, Dianna Winslow, and Pritisha Shrestha
2023
Rowman & Littlefield
The Rhetorical Construction of Vegetarianism
Cristina Hanganu-Bresch
2023
Routledge
“Dainty, Sparkling, Delicious”: Jell-O Constructions of White Femininity
Abby Dubisar
2023
Technical Communication Quarterly
Feminist Ethos and Global Food Systems Rhetorics on Campus
Abby Dubisar
2023
Peitho
Making hamburgers healthy: plant-based meat and the rhetorical (re)constructions of food through science
Jessica Mudry and Ryan J. Phillips
2023
Food, Culture, & Society
Inscrutable Eating Asian Appetites and the Rhetorics of Racial Consumption
Jennifer Lin Lemesurier
2023
The Ohio State University Press
How the Pandemic Redefined Comfort Food: American Individualism, Culinary Relativism, and Shifting Moralities
Lucy M. Long
2022
Popular Culture Studies Journal
The Rhetoric of Food as Medicine: Introduction to Special Issue on the Rhetoric of Food and Health
Cristina Hanganu- Bresch
2022
Rhetoric of Health & Medicine
Coping Through COVID Cooking: Nostalgia and Resilience in Online Communities
Ashli Quesinberry Stokes and Wendy Atkins-Sayre
2022
Popular Culture Studies Journal
Toxically Clean: Homophonic Expertise, Goop, and the Ideology of Choice
Julie Homchick Crowe
2022
Rhetoric of Health & Medicine
Supermarket Culinary Magazine: A Telescope to Observe Portuguese Contemporary Food Culture
Cynthia Luderer and Eveline Baptistella
2022
Popular Culture Studies Journal
Ethos, Hospitality, and the Pursuit of Rhetorical Healing: How Three Decolonial Cookbooks Reconstitute Cultural Identity through Ancestral Foodways
Brita M. Thielen
2022
Rhetoric Review
“Save Money and Save the Planet”: The Rhetorical Appeal and Use of (Anti-)Food Waste and Rescue Apps During Covid-19
Leda Cooks
2022
Popular Culture Studies Journal
Kincentricity and Indigenous Wellbeing: Food(ways) and/as Holistic Health in the Native Medicine Wheel
Rachel Presley
2022
Rhetoric of Health & Medicine
Eating Data: The Rhetorics of Food, Medicine, and Technology in Employee Wellness Programs
Danielle Stambler
2022
Rhetoric of Health & Medicine
The Dialectic of Food Swamps and Clean Food: Ecological Interventions for Disrupting Individualizing Frames of Food Choice
Emma Lozon
2022
Rhetoric of Health & Medicine
“You Are a Bright Light in These Crazy Times”: The Rhetorical Strategies of#BakeClub that Counter Pandemic Isolation and Systemic Racism
Ashley M. Beardsley
2022
Popular Culture Studies Journal
The Rhetoric of Vegan/Vegetarianism, and Health, Medicine, and Culture
Erin Trauth, Vasile Stanescu, Susan Levin, Carrie P. Freeman, Laura Wright, Colleen Patrick-Goudreau
2022
Rhetoric of Health & Medicine
The Rhetoric of Emotions and Food Consumption in Desperate Housewives
Nieves Alberola Crespo
2022
IMAGO Revista de Emblemática y Cultura Visual
Storytelling and Relationality: Faculty Experiences During the Texas Winter Storm
Cedillo et al.
2021
constellations
Women food writers in authoritarian regimes: upholding and subverting power in Cuba’s batistato and Paraguay’s stronato
Lara Anderson and Carlos Uxo
2021
Food, Culture, and Society
From science to sensational headline: a critical examination of the “sugar as toxic” narrative
Hervik et al.
2021
Food, Culture, and Society
Culinary Crimes at the Shame Station: The Food Network’s Role in Policing Indulgent Women
E. Vivian Leigh
2021
McFarland & Company
White Bread as a Working-Class Symbol
Kelli R. Gill
2021
Brill
Genre Bending and Spiritual Resistance: Mina Pachter’s Concentration Camp “Cookbook”
Lisa Mastrangelo
2021
Rhetoric Review
Rhetorics of data in nonprofit settings: How community engagement pedagogies can enact social justice
Jennifer Bay and Rachel Atherton
2021
Computerers and Composition
Reading and Writing the Social Swirls of The French Chef: Social Circulation and the Fan Mail of Julia Child
Lindy E. Briggette
2021
Peitho
Rhetoric of Food Authenticity and National Identity in the New Media
Jamaluddin Bin Aziz, Fuzirah Hashim
2021
GEMA Online Journal of Language Studies
Decolonial Dinners: Ethical Considerations of "Decolonial" Metaphors in TPC
Cana Uluak Itchuaqiyaq and Breeanne Matheson
2021
Technical Communication Quarterly
I Want You to Panic: Leveraging the Rhetoric of Fear and Rage for the Future of Food
Iselin Gambert
2021
Journal of Food Law and Policy
(Re) Mixing Up Literacy: Cookbooks as Rhetorical Remix
Elizabeth J. Fleitz
2021
Community Literacy Journal
On Historical Connections in/to Food as Medicine
Lisa Melonçon
2021
Rhetoric of Health & Medicine
Cultivating Legitimacy as a Farmer
Abby M. Dubisar
2021
Community Literacy Journal
Epistemic Certainty Surrounding Dietary Recommendations for Meat
Ellen M. Street
2021
Xchanges
“More Resilient than Concrete and Steel”: Consciousness-Raising, Self-Discipline, and Bodily Resistance in Solitary Confinement
Chris S. Earle
2020
Rhetoric Society Quarterly
Mexican Food, Assimilation, and Middle-Class Mexican Americans or Chicanx
Jaime Armin Mejía
2020
Latinx Writing and Rhetoric Studies
How to (News) feed a Crowd: Transformation and Collaboration in Digital Food Communities
Kelli R. Gill
2020
Trace
No Mere Culinary Curiosities: Using Historical Cookbooks in the Library Classroom
Kathryn G. Matheny
2020
RBM: A Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Cultural Heritage
Recipes for/of Subversion: The Rhetorical Strategies of The Suffrage Cookbook
Lisa Mastrangelo
2020
Peitho
More than a Sandwich: Developing an Inclusive Summer Lunch Literacy Program in Shippensburg, Pennsylvania
Cell et al.
2020
Reflections
Food for Thought: Constructing Multimodal Identities through Recipe-Creation with Homeless Youth
Amanda Hill
2020
Community Literacy Journal
“An American Orphan”: Amelia Simmons, Cookbook Authorship, and the Feminist Ethē
Elizabeth J. Fleitz
2020
Peitho
Cookery: Food Rhetorics and Social Production
Donovan Conley and Justin Eckstein (editors)
2020
The University of Alabama Press
Food Blogs, Postfeminism, and the Communication of Expertise
Alane L. Presswood
2019
Lexington Books
Reciprocity in Community-Engaged Food and Environmental Justice Scholarship
Dawn S. Opel and Donnie Johnson Sackey
2019
Community Literacy Journal
School Vegetable Gardens As a Site for Reciprocity in Food Systems Research: An Example from Cape Town, South Africa
Jo Hunter-Adams
2019
Community Literacy Journal
La salud en mis manos: Localizing Health and Wellness Literacies in Transnational Communities through Participatory Mindfulness and Art-Based Projects
Flores-Hutson et al.
2019
Present Tense
The Food Justice Portrait Project: First-Year Writing Curriculum to Support Community Agency and Social Justice
Ruth Cary
2019
Reflections
Nutrition, Health, and Wellness at La Escuelita: A Community-Driven Effort Toward Food and Environmental Justice
Del Hierro et al
2019
Community Literacy Journal
Foreign Kitchens, Foreign Lands: Middle Eastern Foodsheds for American Consumers
Jennifer M. Dueck
2019
Global Food History
Food Memoirs: Agency in Public and Private Rhetorical Domains
Kayla Bruce
2019
Peitho
The Digital Sensorium: Considering the Senses in Website Design
Nathaniel T. Voeller
2019
Computers and Composition
Keeping with: The Civic Work of Heritage Claims
Jonathan L. Bradshaw
2019
Rhetoric Review
Re-Making the Makerspace: Body, Power, and Identity in Critical Making Practices
Krystin N. Gollihue
2019
Computers and Composition
More ‘Native’ To Place’: Nurturing Sustainability Traditions through American Indian Studies Service Learning
Jane Haladay
2019
Reflections
Constellating “the Nourishing Arts,” Decolonial Theory, Land, and Indigenous Food Sovereignty Activism through Story, Relations, and Making
Jaquetta Shade
2019
Journal of Global Literacies, Technologies, and Emerging Pedagogies
Composing at the Kitchen Table
Rhiannon Scharnhorst
2019
Graduate Food Studies Journal
“Alisdayhv: A Cherokee Foodways Memoir.”
Jaquetta Shade
2018
Intermezzo
Hunger on the Homepage: Reading Suffrage Cookbooks and Food Blogs
Molly Mann
2018
Graduate Food Studies Journal
“Hear the Table Call of the South:” White Supremacist Rhetoric and the 1950 Charleston Receipts Junior League Cookbook
Amy Mecklenburg-Faenger
2018
Peitho
Walking (in) the Ethnic Aisle: Latinidad/es Stocked in the Market
Ana Roncero-Bellido
2018
Journal of Multimodal Rhetoric
“More than Just a Plot of Land”: Intersecting Identities and Rhetorical Impact of Michelle Obama’s Kitchen Garden
Ronisha Browdy
2018
Women & Language
Representation, Resistance, and Rhetoric: Bananas Catalyze Campus Activism
Abby M. Dubisar and Gabrielle E. Roesche-McNally
2018
Present Tense
Culinary Poetics and Edible Images in Twentieth-Century American Literature
Stacie Cassarino.
2018
Ohio State University Press
Have Your Epideictic Rhetoric, and Eat It, Too
Rachael Graham Lussos
2018
Journal of Multimodal Rhetoric
Domestic sensualism: Laurie Colwin’s food writing
Tanfer Emin Tunc
2018
Food, Culture, and Society
“Bridging the Gap between Food Pantries and the Kitchen Table”: Teaching Embodied Literacy in the Technical Communication Classroom
Kathryn Yankura Swacha
2018
Technical Communication Quarterly
(Dis)comfort food: connecting food, social media, and first-year college undergraduates
Michael Pennell
2018
Food, Culture, and Society
More Than a Lens: Reflections on Eating, Materiality, and Practice
Maria Kuczera
2018
Graduate Food Studies Journal
Teaching ethos from the dumpster: Dive and food waste rhetoric
Kathleen Hunt, Abby Dubisar
2017
Communication Teacher
Food, Feminisms, Rhetoric
Melissa A. Goldthwaite
2017
Southern Illinois University Press
Toward a Feminist Food Rhetoric
Abby M. Dubisar
2017
Rhetoric Review
“Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom”: Jihadist Tactical Technical Communication and the Everyday Practice of Cooking.
Hilary A. Sarat-St. Peter
2017
Technical Communication Quarterly
Eating the North: An Analysis of the Cookbook “NOMA: Time & Place in Nordic Cuisine”
L. Sasha Gora
2017
Graduate Food Studies Journal
ACDC Agency: Food and Politics with Community College Students at Vassar
Robert Cowan
2017
Radical Teacher
Farm to Table: The Home Management House as Rhetorical Space for Rural Women
Melissa Nivens
2017
Peitho
Uncertain Truths: On the Limits of the Critique of Globalization and the Sciences
Krishnendu Ray
2017
Food, Culture, and Society
#EatingfortheInsta: A Semiotic Analysis of Digital Representations of Food on Instagram
Jenny L. Herman
2017
Graduate Food Studies Journal
Taco Literacy: Public Advocacy and Mexican Food in the U.S. Nuevo South
Steven Alvarez
2017
Composition Studies
Uptaking Race: Genre, MSG, and Chinese Dinner
Jennifer L LeMesurier
2017
Poroi
Caveat Emptor! The Rhetoric of Choice in Food Politics
Andrew Calabrese
2017
Communication +1
Consuming Identity: The Role of Food in Redefining the South
Ashli Quesinberry Stokes, Wendy Atkins-Sayre
2016
University Press of Mississippi
The Dinner Table Debate and the Uses of Hospitality
Eric Leake
2016
Present Tense
Cartographic Communities of Locavores: Local Ideographs & Spatial Rhetoric
Darcy Mullen
2016
Graduate Food Studies Journal
No Motherland Without You: The Feminine Pastoral in North Korean Food & Agricultural Propaganda
Miki Kawasaki
2016
Graduate Food Studies Journal
Writing Cuisine in the Spanish Caribbean: A Comparative Analysis of Iconic Puerto Rican and Cuban cookbooks
Melissa Fuster
2016
Food, Culture, and Society
Food Fights: Cookbook Rhetorics, Monolithic Constructions of Womanhood, and Field Narratives in Technical Communication
Marie E. Moellera and Erin A. Frost
2016
Technical Communication Quarterly
Linking Rural Women Transnationally: Iowa’s “First Lady of the Farm” and Post WWII Ethos
Abby M. Dubisar
2016
Peitho
“If I Can’t Bake, I Don’t Want To Be Part of Your Revolution”: CODEPINK’s Activist Literacies of Peace and Pie
Abby Dubisar
2016
Community Literacy Journal
Blood Sugar: Racial Pharmacology and Food Justice in Black America
Anthony Ryan Hatch
2016
University of Minnesota Press
Taco Literacies: Ethnography, Foodways, and Emotions through Mexican Food Writing
Steven Alvarez
2016
Composition Forum
“Thug Life” in a White Kitchen: Exploring Race Work in the Language of Cookbooks
Meaghan Elliott
2016
Graduate Food Studies Journal
Lost in Translation: The Rhetoric of Nutrition and Starvation
Cathryn Piwinski
2016
Journal of Social and Cultural Analysis
Sponsors of Agricultural Literacies: Intersections of Institutional and Local Knowledge in a Farming Community
Marcy L. Galbreath
2015
Community Literacy Journal
Community Cookbooks: Sponsors of Literacy and Community Identity
Lisa Mastrangelo
2015
Community Literacy Journal
The Politics of Wine and the Style of Bullshit
Anna M. Young
2015
Rhetoric Society Quarterly
Nutritional Noise: Community Literacies and the Movement Against Foods Labeled as “Natural”
Erin Trauth
2015
Community Literacy Journal
An Appetite for Rhetoric
Nathan Stormer
2015
Philosophy and Rhetoric
Food Scholarship and Food Writing
Smith et al.
2015
Food, Culture, and Society
“Squirrel, if You're so Inclined”: Recipes, Narrative and the Rhetoric of Southern Identity
Carrie Helms Tippen
2015
Food, Culture, and Society
The Rhetoric of Food: Precendent Food Texts as Inventio
Adrienne P. Lamberti
2015
Poroi
De aquí y de allá: Changing Perceptions of Literacy through Food Pedagogy, Asset-Based Narratives, and Hybrid Spaces
Dura et al.
2015
Community Literacy Journal
Writing the Food Studies Movement
Marion Nestle and William Mcintosh
2015
Food, Culture, and Society
“EATING FRESH” IN AMERICA: SUBWAY RESTAURANT’S NUTRITIONAL RHETORIC
Jessica Lundgren
2015
Young Scholars in Writing
Mindful Persistence: Literacies for Taking up and Sustaining Fermented-Food Projects
Santana et al.
2015
Community Literacy Journal
Will Write for Food: The Complete Guide to Writing Blogs, Cookbooks, Reviews, Memoirs, and More..
Dianne Jacob
2015
Hachette Books
“Taste Analytically”: Julia Child’s Rhetoric of Cultivation
Erin L. Branch
2015
Rhetoric Society Quarterly
Eating Words: A Norton Anthology of Food Writing
Sandra M. Gilbert and Roger J. Porter
2015
W. W. Norton
Writing the Wolf Away : food meaning & memories from world war II
Meryl S. Rosofsky
2015
Food, Culture, and Society
Community Food Literacies: An Introduction
Michael Pennell
2015
Community Literacy Journal
The Radical Potential of the Food Justice Movement
Nancy Romer
2014
Radical Teacher
Re-Framing the Argument: Critical Service- Learning and Community-Centered Food Literacy
Veronica House
2014
Community Literacy Journal
Word of Mouth: What We Talk About When We Talk About Food
Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson
2014
University of California Press
Whose Food Revolution? Perspectives from a Food Service Training Academy
Doris Friedensohn
2014
Radical Teacher
Agroecological Formación in Rural Social Movements
McCune et al.
2014
Radical Teacher
Basic Writing Through the Back Door: Community-Engaged Courses in the Rush-to- Credit Age
Cori Brewster
2014
Basic Writing E-Journal
Writing in the Kitchen: Essays on Southern Literature and Foodways
Edited by David A. Davis and Tara Powell
2014
University Press of Mississippi
"Revising the Menu to Fit the Budget": Grocery Lists and Other Rhetorical Heirlooms
Jamie White-Farnham
2014
College English
Mobilizing to Re-value and Re-skill Foodservice Labor in U.S. School Lunchrooms: A Pathway to Community-level Food Sovereignty?
Jennifer E. Gaddis
2014
Radical Teacher
“Good For You and Good To You": The Importance of Emphasizing Race when Radicalizing Students around the Food Movement
John M. Burdick
2014
Radical Teacher
Radical Teaching and the Food Justice Movement
Annas et al.
2014
Radical Teacher
Feeding Revolution: The Black Panther Party and the Politics of Food
Mary Potorti
2014
Radical Teacher
Let Them Eat Organic Cake
Meghan Lynch and Audrey Giles
2013
Food, Culture, and Society
The Rhetoric of Food: Discourse, Materiality, and Power
Joshua Frye, Michael Bruner
2013
Routledge
What Does Your Money Get You?: Active Learning as an Alternative to Consumerism in the Composition Classroom
Faith Kurtyka
2013
Composition Forum
Not A Self-Help Class: On Teaching Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto
Andrew Tonkovich
2013
Radical Teacher
Healthy Living: Metaphors We Eat By?
Spoel et al.
2012
Present Tense
Eliza Leslie's 1854 The Behaviour Book and the Conduct of Women's Writing
Alexandria Peary
2012
Rhetoric Review
V is for Voices: Engaging Student Interest, Sustaining Student Thinking and Writing in Today’s Writing Classrooms with Fountainhead Press’s V Series
Amy Patrick Mossman
2012
Composition Forum
How the Other Half Ate: A History of Working-Class Meals at the Turn of the Century
Katherine Leonard Turner
2012
University of California Press
The moralization of healthy living: Burke’s rhetoric of rebirth and older adults’ accounts of healthy eating
Philippa Spoel, Roma Harris, Flis Henwood
2012
Health: An Interdisciplinary Journal for the Social Study of Health, Illness, and Medicine
“Wellness” as Incipient Illness: Dietary Supplements in a Biomedical Culture
Colleen Derkatch
2012
Present Tense
Bunnies for Pets or Meat: The Slaughterhouse as Cinematic Metaphor
Winifred J. Wood
2011
JAC
Rhetorical Recipes: Women’s Literacies In and Out of the Kitchen
Jamie White-Farnham
2011
Community Literacy Journal
Cooking Codes: Cookbook Discourses as Women’s Rhetorical Practices
Elizabeth J. Fleitz
2010
Present Tense
Teaching Taboos: An Annotated Bibliography of Unconventional Resources for the Rhetoric Classroom
Megan Condis and Sarah Alexander
2010
Enculturation
Putting China's Technical Communication into Historical Context: A Look at the Chinese Culinary Instruction Genre
Han Yu
2009
Technical Communication
Lydia J. Roberts's Nutrition Research and the Rhetoric of"Democratic" Science
Jordynn Jack
2009
CCC
Troubling Images: PETA’s “Holocaust on Your Plate” and the Limits of Image Events
C. Richard King
2009
Enculturation
How What You Eat Defines Who You Are: The Food Theme in Four American Women Writers
Irenna Ya-Hui
2008
Edwin Mellon Press
The Organic Foods System: Its Discursive Achievements and Prospects
David M. Nowacek and Rebecca S. Nowacek
2008
College English
Books That Cook: Teaching Food and Food Literature in the English Classroom
Jennifer Cognard-Black and Melissa A. Goldthwaite
2008
College English
Good, Clean, Fair: The Rhetoric of the Slow Food Movement
Stephen Schneider
2008
College English
Food Memoirs: What They Are, Why They Are Popular, and Why They Belong in the Literature Classroom
Barbara Frey Waxman
2008
College English
Consuming Prose: The Delectable Rhetoric of Food Writing
Lynn Z. Bloom
2008
College English
A Recipe for Remembrance: Memory and Identity in African-American Women's Cookbooks
Rosalyn Collings Eves
2005
Rhetoric Review
Testifying, Silencing, Monumentalizing, Swallowing: Coming to Terms with "In Memory 's Kitchen"
Rona Kaufman
2004
JAC
The Rhetoric of Food: Food as Nature, Commodity and Culture
Eivind Jacobsen
2004
Bloomsbury
Eat My Words: Reading Women's Lives Through the Cookbooks They Wrote
Janet Theophano
2003
Macmillan
Joe's rhetoric: Finding authenticity at starbucks
Greg Dickinson
2002
Rhetoric Society Quarterly
Slow-Food A Luncheon Allegory
Sharon Bassett
1981
CCC
Still Life: Woman Cooking
Sandra M. Gilbert
1970
College English
bottom of page